Owen Rees leads early-music consort Contrapunctus alongside The Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford in a performance of John Taverner’s masterwork, the Missa Gloria tibi trinitas, as well as a variety of the composer's motets. The groups' recording of this repertoire received a Diapason d’or in January 2020, and the accompanying review comments: ‘The alternation of top-flight soloists and a perfect choir here produces marvels … A triumph of the English choral tradition at its best.’
A virtuosic work, the Missa Gloria tibi trinitas is an example of the dramatic way in which large-scale Tudor polyphony exploited contrasts between passages for solo voices and the whole choral group. It has pride of place in the Forrest-Heyther partbooks (in the Bodleian Library, Oxford), and might well have been heard on Trinity Sunday in the chapel of Cardinal Wolsey’s palace at Hampton Court